Multi-tasking robot brings science fiction to life

WEST GOSHEN — If you ignore science-fiction robots for a moment and think about business reality, you’d agree with Chris Herbert that the new product from Rethink Robotics is a tool, basically, that’s most remarkable for its versatility.

But then Herbert puts his hand on the new product’s right positioning device — all right, fine, its right arm — and Baxter turns his head and looks at him with its strangely expressive eyes, and you’re right back in the world of science fiction again.

On Friday, Rethink had a demonstration for the media of its new product, a robot named Baxter, at the West Goshen headquarters of Onexia, a company that helps businesses automate and is the exclusive regional distributor for Baxter.

The first thing you notice is that Baxter is the closest thing you may ever see in real life to the kind of humanoid robots we’re used to seeing in science-fiction films. Baxter has an upper body on a rolling base, two arms with grippers on the ends, and a head with a monitor displaying an image of large eyes that change their expression depending on the situation.

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But once you get past the resemblance to a mechanical person and watch Baxter operate, its versatility becomes evident. On Friday morning, Baxter was taking tubing caps off a holder and placing them on a table with one arm. With the other it was taking boxes from a jumble of different items and putting them in a box.

Baxter’s appearance may fit the stereotypical movie robot, but according to Herbert, manager of solutions sales for Rethink, in the real world of industrial robots it’s something very new.

“This is a new class of robot,” Herbert says. “It’s a collaborative robot.”

Baxter has an array of sensing devices, including sonar in its head area and cameras in its head and arms. When a person comes near it, it slows down whatever it’s doing. Herbert steps close to it as it’s working, close enough that Baxter’s arm touches him, and the robot immediately stops.

“We say that it has some common sense,” Herbert says.

According to Greg Selke, chief executive of Onexia, that factor alone makes Baxter a new type of industrial robot. Typical robots, the kind that weld car parts together and do other heavy work, are dangerous to be around and need to be fenced off so people don’t blunder into them. But Baxter can work alongside people, doing packing or sorting or other factory tasks, without posing any threat.

Another new feature with Baxter is the ease with which it can learn new tasks.

Other robots typically need technicians to program them. But anyone can put Baxter in program mode and show it the task it should do by moving its arms and actuating its grippers. Cameras in its arms make a three-dimensional model in its memory of the object it should work with, so it can recognize those objects from any angle.

One visitor was able to teach Baxter new tasks after just a few minutes of getting familiar with it. Selke says the versatility is well suited for today’s factories, which are often making smaller runs of various sorts of products.

“You can have Baxter doing something for an hour, a day, a week,” Herbert says, “and then wheel it over to another part of the factory and have it doing something else right away.”

The previous day, Selke had done a demonstration for 52 potential buyers, with Baxter doing everything from packing candy to collecting leaf samples from plants for testing.

Selke says Baxter costs about $25,000, and has a working life that makes it the equivalent of having an employee who will work for $4 or $5 an hour. That can help manufacturers in the United States compete with low-wage countries, and allows their employees to focus on higher-skill work.

When people tell him Baxter will take jobs, Selke has a response ready. “Our answer is ‘absolutely,’” he says. “Jobs in Asia.”